A person in the workplace typically has a telephone at his or her disposal, along with one or more personal computers. Usually these telephony and computing devices, or generally “data-processing devices,” are physically distinct from one another. Additionally, some or all of the devices associated with a particular user might be networked together, either by direct physical connection (e.g., universal serial bus cable, etc.) or through a local area network (e.g., Ethernet-based network, etc.).
Sometimes, a set of data-processing devices can be configured to share common peripheral devices such as a keyboard, a mouse, and a video display. FIG. 1 depicts telecommunications system 100 in the prior art, in which such a shared configuration is present. System 100 comprises input devices 101-1 through 101-M, wherein M is a positive integer; video display device 102; device switch 103; first data-processing device 104-1; additional data-processing devices 104-2 through 104-N, wherein N is a positive integer greater than one; and telecommunications network 105, interconnected as shown.
Input device 101-m, where m can be equal to 1 through M, is a peripheral device that is used to accept external data and to provide that data to one or more data-processing devices that process the data provided, such as devices 104-1 through 104-N. The external data can come from different sources, including a user, human or machine, of one or more of the data-processing devices. Input devices 101-1 through 101-M can be one or more of a keyboard, a keypad, a mouse, a scanner, a webcam, a microphone, an analog-to-digital (A/D) converter, a barcode reader, a joystick, a touch screen, a digitizing tablet, an optical pen, and so forth. In telecommunications system 100, input device 101-1 is a keyboard, which is a character and user-selection input device as is well known in the art; device 101-1 receives input from a user and transmits keyboard signals representing that input to a data-processing device.
Video display device 102 is a peripheral device that enables a user to visually perceive the data processed by one or more data-processing devices (e.g., devices 104-1 through 104-N, etc.). Video display device 102 receives displayable, electromagnetic signals and converts those electromagnetic signals into visual signals that are displayed for the user.
Device switch 103 is a hardware device that allows a user to control and monitor multiple data-processing devices from a single set of input devices, the set typically comprising a keyboard, a video display, and a mouse. One example of device switch 103 in the prior art is a KVM switch, where “KVM” is an initialism for “Keyboard, Video, Mouse.” Multiple personal computers can be connected to a KVM switch, along with the previously-identified peripheral devices.
Data-processing devices 104-1 through 104-N include personal computers and workstations. These devices can be networked together through telecommunications network 105, which typically comprises a local-area network.
Although device switch 103 enables the depicted data-processing devices to share at least some of the same input and output peripherals, not all combinations of data-processing devices lend themselves to a straightforward sharing of peripherals. And often there are some combinations of data-processing devices that are flatly inconsistent with at least some of the peripheral-sharing techniques in the prior art.
What is needed is a technique that enables peripheral sharing within additional combinations of data-processing devices, without some of the disadvantages in the prior art.